LAS VEGAS—It makes sense that Kevin Spacey would produce a film about gambling. He knows a little about taking risks. In 2003, he decided to put the momentum of two Oscars in four years on hold and attempt to save the Old Vic theatre in London, once the home of the National Theatre, which was under the auspices of Laurence Olivier in the 1960s and ’70s.

The British press did what was expected: it assailed Spacey’s productions and seldom gave him passing marks for his work as an actor or as the Old Vic Theatre Company’s artistic director. One leading critic went so far as to call on him to resign.

He was also criticized earlier in his Old Vic career for leaving to make movies. He has continued to produce, direct, and act in films, but admits, in a Las Vegas casino, that he won’t be staying long in the U.S. to promote the film 21, which he produced and appears in. “We cancelled two performances so I could come here. I am back on a plane tonight, and I will be on-stage tomorrow night,” Spacey says. (The film opens Friday [March 28] in Vancouver.)

The movie features Across the Universe’s Jim Sturgess as Ben Campbell, an MIT student who needs cash to go to Harvard Medical School. His professor, Micky Rosa (Spacey), tells him he can help to make that happen. All Ben has to do is join Rosa and some fellow students on a team that is going to count cards in Las Vegas. When they get there, Ben discovers he’s pretty good at it, and that he likes the life of a successful gambler. Meanwhile, the casinos the group is hitting are becoming suspicious of Ben’s success, and are looking for a way to stop the bleeding.

Spacey and his producing partner Dana Brunetti bought the rights to Ben Mezrich’s book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, and set out to make a movie. Spacey says they didn’t get much cooperation from the school, which apparently wasn’t interested in reminding people of the incidents brought to light by the book.

“We wanted to shoot there, but they decided they didn’t want to be involved,” he says. “We were allowed to fly over to shoot the campus, but we had to shoot it [the movie] at Boston University instead. We managed to shoot most of it there, and the rest in the casinos in Vegas. It’s based on that story, but you have to understand there were more than 150 people who participated in these teams over many years, and the character I play is a composite of several people. I am sure there will be a few people who will say, ”˜I am the person that character is based on.’ In fact, just last night at the premiere I met people who said, ”˜The character was based on me.’ That was nice for them, but we really fictionalized the story a lot.”

When Spacey and Brunetti discovered the story, gambling wasn’t a particularly hot topic for movies or television. Spacey says that has changed in recent years, and that there was evidence they would have to make their movie relevant in order to find an audience in 2008.

“We wanted to look at the theme of people having to take responsibility for their own actions,” he says. “When we found the book five years ago, we were ahead of the curve, but in the last few years there have been so many movies and TV shows about gambling we had to think about how we were going to make Vegas interesting again. We always felt that balancing what these [academic] kids are like in Boston and the way that they are in the world they have in Vegas, that somehow the audience would be able to follow what the real game is.”

Spacey, who directed Beyond the Sea and has been producing movies with Brunetti through their Trigger Street Productions, is still able to find time between those films and the Old Vic to act in other people’s movies. He says, however, that he prefers unique roles in movies that will encourage new filmmaking talent.

“I am not so completely caught up in my own sense of how to make movies that I don’t think other actors can’t make movies. I made a movie last summer with an actor named Nick Moran, who wrote a play a couple of years ago that is the true story of a guy in the record industry who was a kind of wild, inventive guy who changed the record industry in Great Britain, called Telstar. I had nothing to do with it [besides acting in it], but I saw it recently and I think it is something really special.”